MySQL, NoSQL, and NuoDB

I've been keen on MySQL ever since I first started using it heavily more than a decade ago. In fact, I liked it well enough to include it as one of the four main database platforms, over and above the ANSI-ISO SQL standard, in my popular book SQL in a Nutshell. However, with the advent of NoSQL data platforms in the last few years, the waters have been muddied. It's no longer a quick easy decision as to which database platform you should use, both because there are many new platforms to choose from and because the old, easy choices aren't as cut and dried as they used to be. MySQL, for example, is now owned by Oracle which definitely complicates the decision, at least in terms of the mainstream commercial versions of that product, while the brain-trust that started MySQL has gone on to the alternative database platform called MariaDB.

Rather than dive straight into the alternative next-gen of MySQL, I decided to investigate more powerful alternatives that offer more of the benefits of NoSQL and cloud-centric databases. That's when I landed on NuoDB. It’s has been generally available for a few months now as a straight database platform. It didn’t have any real Microsoft-oriented features until recently. Then last month the company announced a bunch of Microsoft enhancements, many which are great for developers, so I downloaded it. (You might have seen my tweets from that time when I first started to check it out).

From their website:

64 bit support for Windows Server, Windows 7 and 8 for high performance

Full support for Visual Studio 2012, LINQ and Entity Framework for a more integrated developer experience

Now it’s possible to build and deploy .NET applications using standard Microsoft tools and frameworks against a back-end that has built-in scale up elasticity. In other words, it gives you some of the best features of some of the NoSQL platforms while also giving you some of the best features of Azure. If you are interested in trying it out, there are 2 free version available for download here. And definitely let me know what you think. As you probably know, I'm not a hard-code .NET developer. So I'm interested in hearing from professional developers about its capabilities.